THE LESSON OF THE BUTTON

The other day Mike complained that he had lost a button off the cuff of an old faded flannel shirt. “Can we throw it away now,” I asked under my breath. But no, he wanted a button on that cuff.

Even though I never thought the shirt in question was anything extra, its buttons were a cut above the standard. “I’ll never be able to match it,” I whined. “I’ll have to change all the buttons.”

“It’s just an old shirt,” Mike said. “Just sew a button on the cuff. Any button will do.”

He simply doesn’t understand. I wasn’t raised that way. There were rules about buttons, and my mother enforced them.

I grew up in the world of buttons. No jeans and t-shirts for me. My blouses, jackets, coats, and sweaters all had buttons. My little-girl dresses buttoned up the back. Shirt-waist dresses buttoned up the front. My mother taught the importance of preserving the integrity of the garment, and button-checking was part of that.

Rule #1: Check your clothes for loose or missing buttons.

Rule #2: A loose button, even if it appears to be affixed, must be repaired immediately lest you lose the button.

Rule #3: A found button should be saved in a safe place (the kitchen window) and all clothing checked immediately in order to locate its rightful home. (It’s amazing that in the world of buttons, buttons will turn up inexplicably and their home never found.)

Rule #4: Don’t wear clothes with missing buttons.

Rule #5: A lost button requires a search -- first for the button and, if not found, then for a match, hence the button box of saved buttons, which is mostly useless. (We could throw away the button box and never miss it or its contents.)

Rule #6: Mismatching buttons is unacceptable. If the lost button is not found, all buttons on the garment in question must be replaced -- a waste of time, effort, and (possibly) money.

Losing a button was unforgivable to my mother’s way of thinking. A school-age child was capable of checking buttons and reporting “loosages.”

There was some evidence that teachers also knew the button rules. If a button was spied on the floor, lessons stopped while a general announcement was made: “Students, has anyone lost a button? Check your clothes now.” It was a little embarrassing if you had to claim the button, because of course, you were admitting to a classroom of peers that you had failed Rule #1. Even worse, if my mother found a button missing when I came home from school, I was required to ask the teacher the next day if anyone had found it. How embarrassing!

And that’s the way it was in the ‘50s. Mothers and teachers were “on the same page” about seemingly insignificant things, a carry-over from a by-gone era that would be gone in the ‘60s. And yet, there was structure in that and comfort in the structure. It wasn’t so much the rule that was important. It was the obedience to that rule, that standard. We were practicing with simple, understandable rules so that we might apply those lessons to bigger issues, things that really mattered.  

Meanwhile, I searched to no avail for a match to that shirt button, and you know what that meant. No, I didn’t replace all the buttons as I might have if Mike wore that shirt to the office. Instead, I cut the button from the neck and sewed it on the cuff, leaving the neck without a button. This is an infraction of Rule #4 instead of Rule #6, but when you’ve broken Rule #1, you have to be innovative. And all of this somehow shows laxity in my character. KW